The Devil in the Pines
by AIs4Awsome
Summary: After her mothers latest suicide attempt, seventeen year old Jenny and her younger sister are sent to live in the small unassuming town of Crows Landing, Maine when she meets a strange boy and things aren't at all what they seem.


Perhaps because her second marriage had only lasted twenty two months or perhaps because she was having a bad hair day, my mother swallowed a whole bottle of Ambien and called my stepfather at his motel to say goodbye.

Although they were still legally married , he had installed himself at Pete's Roadside Dive while she sued him for divorce. After he received her farewell call, he quickly finished his Budweiser, telephoned the fire department, grabbed his old hunting jacket, lit a Pall Mall, and jumped into his 1982 Ford Roadster. While my mother arranged herself on the ugly black and white linoleum floor of her bathroom and prepared herself for the Valley of the Dolls I slept soundly in the trailer's back room that I shared with my sister, dreaming of hot dogs.

We had been living in my stepfathers trailer for nearly a year and a half and while I would later think of the place as a shitty backdrop for my mother's tumultuous marriage - the place that would ultimately define itself as my last true home before the Bad Thing - at the time it was like any other place I'd lived in, small and unremarkable and broken down, in which I was about to find myself awakened by my mother's rescuers.

I was driven from the deep blackness of sleep by a strange plinking sound, high and metallic. It sounded like rain falling only heavier and inside the house. Pulling on a two-sizes too-big hoodie over my pajamas, I climbed out of bed, tip-toed past my sister's still sleeping figure - Katie could sleep through just about anything - and stepped out into the narrow hallway. I peeked around the corner to find three firemen in big dark coats beating down the bathroom door with axes. One of them stood on a small stool splintering away at the decorative glass over the door. The shards of the glass rained down on the men below and bounced off their helmets, making a delicate tinkling noise as they hit the grimy floor. Despite the horrifying reality of the situation, I found myself mentally calculating how pissed Mom would be when (and if) she saw the mess they were making. Mom hated messes. ("It's because I'm a Pisces" she would explain).

The firemen took no notice of me, didn't bother looking away from their work at the tell-tale sound of the trailer door squeaking open. My stepfather in his rain slicked hunting jacket bustled into the cramped room. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised that he had deemed it appropriate to show up to my mother's suicide attempt; I hadn't seen him in a while. Even in the thick of his marriage to my mother he hadn't been around much.

"Christ, what a mess." he said, running a hand over his face and surveying the chaos. "Your mama ain't gonna like the sight of this when she comes to."

"Hey, Treelore," I said, ignoring his callousness, "You stickin' around?"

"Sure, darlin'."

Yet another in what was becoming a series of big fat lies that made up my primary interactions with Mom's seemingly endless string of paramours. He pointedly avoided my gaze as he pushed passed me. In such close proximity the smell of Pall Malls and booze hit me like a lorry. The firefighters didn't seem to notice as they parted for him like the Red Sea and watched as he began pounding his fist against the door.

"Louanne? Louanne! You open this goddamn door right now!"

There was silence as everyone held their breath and waited, listening for some sign of life from the other side of the now-battered door. One minute ticked by, then two. Nothing. Crossing his arms over his chest, my stepfather stood back and allowed the firefighters to continue to hack through it.

From the far side of all this noise, flying glass, and splintered wood, appeared Grandma Moses, a plush lined monstrosity in her fluffy bathrobe and slippers. Her cold creamed and bespeckled face was set into a impermeable mask of disapproval, with which she seemed to regard almost every passing event in her daughter's household.

She put her hands on her wide hips and demanded "What in the hell is goin' on here?" The men didn't stop. My stepfather ignored her.

Grandma Moses regarded the drama playing out before her with a decided air of disgust, not unlike someone who had just turned on the T.V to a bad b-list reality show. That is, until she saw me standing a mere three and a half feet behind her. She raised her overly plucked eyebrows, fixed me with a mean look. This was something Grandma Moses could do - shield her granddaughter from Louanne's craziness.

"Don't you have school in the morning?" she barked. An order, not a question.

I opened my mouth, closed it again. She positioned herself in front of me and I looked up. Even at 5'7, Grandma towered over me, a cotton swathed mountain with a crown of curlers. Her huge body completely blocked my view from the action. Outside I could hear the sound of sirens, loud and bleating, could see electric flashes of blue and red dance through the window above the kitchen sink across from the bathroom. I tried to watch but Grandma Moses clutched at my shoulder with a massive bear-like paw and steered me towards the direction of the back room.

"C'mon, Jenny-girl. Git back to bed.".

I bristled, but only for a moment, resentful at being sent back to bed like a naughty child. Unfortunately, I knew far better than to balk in front of Grandma Moses.

Inside, I allowed her to shoo me back to my bed. I pulled the thin sheets up to my chin and listened to her heavy breathing as she leaned over my sisters bed to fix the covers she had kicked off. Without another word, Grandma Moses lumbered over to the door and closed it gently, disappearing back out into the hallway. The room was dark except for the thin line of light that streamed in through the crack beneath the door. My eyes traced over the bare walls, the low ceiling, the clothes strewn floor. I heard the wheels of the stretcher in the hall and against my better judgment, I threw the sheets off, crawled out of bed and opened the door and peeked out.

Even half-dead my mother was beautiful. She had the icy good looks of a Grace Kelly lookalike - striking cheek bones, aristocratic nose, high forehead. Her blonde hair, gleaming like a waterfall even in the semidarkness, lay tousled on the stretcher pillow. That was how my mother was - catching all the available light in any room and making it apart of her. She was wearing her blue imitation silk nightgown that seemed to accentuate the frailty of her rail-thin body. My stomach knotted itself into nothing as I watched the paramedics wheel her out of the trailer and into the driveway where the ambulance waited. While I believed Mom was safe with these calm, serious strangers, I wondered what would happen to Katie and I. Mom had tried to kill herself three times in the last four years - what if this time she didn't wake up? What if this time she'd taken one pill too many - or one pill too few - and she was now a vegetable? I realized with a knawing sense of dread that despite the callousness and indifference I occasionally felt towards my high maintenance mother that I was genuinely afraid for her. Even doped up on the antidepressants her doctors handed out to her like candy, she was still my mother. Now the questions began to go round and round out the back of my mind, faster and faster, like some sort of morbid merry go round; What would I tell Katie? What would we do if the doctors decided to keep her in the hospital forever? Would she even care? Where would me and Katie go then? I climbed back into bed, stared at the ceiling, tried to slow my racing mind. The low murmuring of my stepfather and the firemen ended with a sudden click of the front door and a quiet, waiting stillness effulged me. I listened to my sisters shallow breathing, the low yip of a coyote out on the hills.

As I lay in bed, becoming more and more neurotic with every passing second, Mom was carted off to Ridgemount Hospital where all the Ambien was pumped out of her and she was put on psychiatric watch for twenty-four hours. By the time she was released, my stepfather paid off the neighbors to keep mum about the whole thing; she never went to the hospital, it never happened. In the end my mother's plan with her suicide attempt to scare my stepfather into sticking around hadn't worked. We never saw him again.


End file.
